


Bring down the protracted legal proceedings

by Slant



Series: Bureaucrat effect [1]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Bureaucracy, Gen, Legal Drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 02:25:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slant/pseuds/Slant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ka'hairal Balak is forced to experience years of tiresome legal argument.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bring down the protracted legal proceedings

Ka'hairal Balak was bored. It was seven months since he was committed the greatest feet of daring his people had engaged in since leaving the council; two months in hospital and five months of tiresome legal wrangling. You use mass drivers on an inhabited world and you expect reaction, but the humans hadn't blinked. They'd arrested him, gathered forensic evidence, eyewitness testimony and electronic surveillance data, asked him if he wanted to retain council, assigned him a defence team when he'd refused to acknowledge their jurisdiction, and started cross examinations and complicated legal arguments.

His defence team. No. The defence team, they weren't his, were, as far as he could tell, well-trained, hard working, committed and devastatingly intelligent; no one was going to look at the result of this trial and declare it a set-up; interstellar observers had full access to the trial personnel, and their records would be unsealed whenever their governments felt like embarrassing Earth.

The defence team had just spent a week trying to get some of the electronic record expunged from the trial record on the basis that it did not conform to current data standards. It wasn't quite true that the humans were indifferent to his attack; there was actually some buzz around the court at the possibility of prosecuting the first fully Total Quality Assurance-compliant war-crimes* tribunal. He'd been issued with a VI which helped him keep up with the lawyer's discussions, giving potted histories of important precedent cases, which he was slowly beginning to realise, was how he was to be remembered, not as a martyr to the cause of Batarian independence, but as "Balak _vs_ Terra Nova [2183]", a significant case in Total Evidence Quality.

*Following some backroom discussions and the threat of legal proceedings from the Council, the state of Terra Nova had acknowledged that the Council was the proper body to prosecute the attempted destruction of a habitable biosphere. That trial was to be held once this one was over. 


End file.
